Friday Feb 22, 2013

Oracle’s Java evangelist and noted Java EE expert, Arun Gupta, presented a session at the annual IOUC (International Oracle User Community) Summit, held January 14–16, 2013, at Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores, California, where more than 100 top user group leaders from around the world gathered to share best practices, provide feedback, and receive updates from leading Oracle developers.

Gupta’s talk, titled "The Java EE 7 Platform: Higher Productivity and Embracing HTML5," presented a glimpse into the rich possibilities that will be available in Java EE 7 upon its release in the spring of 2013. He covered several major developments, including:

Gupta focuses on ways in which Java EE 7 offers higher productivity; less boilerplate; richer functionality; more default options; and HTML5 support in the form of WebSocket and JSON. He also observed that the cloud is in need of more standards. From the article:

"There are not enough standards in the cloud with W3C and other standards bodies. More standards are needed so that we can define a Java API for the cloud. Premature standardization can also be a problem if not enough innovation has taken place. So what is the right thing for the platform? We have reached out to the community, the core group members, and the executive committee of the Java Community Process and have focused on providing higher productivity and on embracing the HTML5 platform more closely. We are going to use dependency injection a lot more, which will give developers the ability to write less boilerplate code and offer richer functionality such as batch applications and caching. Similarly, for HTML5, we are embracing WebSocket functionality and the ability to parse and generate a JSON structure. We are providing support for HTML5-friendly markup as part of JSF.”

Gupta summarized the strengths of the various JSRs and closed by encouraging developers to participate in Adopt-a-JSR, a project that enables them to, “pursue their interest in particular Java EE 7 JSRs and download code, play with it, report bugs, and offer feedback to Java EE 7 specification leads.”